Grab on to your wallets, everyone.
Remember: this $101.5m budget is only a latte a week.
At some point, the boiling frog is going to die.
From the Moscow-Pullman Daily News:
The Moscow City Council approved the proposed $101.5 million fiscal 2020 budget Monday, including pay raises for Moscow police officers and seasonal parks and recreation staff — a point of lengthy discussion at the previous council meeting.
“I feel it’s really important for the public servants to be paid their worth, and just like I said last time, this to me is something we have to do,” Councilor Kathryn Bonzo said Monday.
The pay raises will come from the $200,000 in forgone tax authority. Forgone taxes are taxes that were authorized in previous years, but never levied. The city will have $124,296 left in forgone money remaining after 2020.
“For me, paying 27 extra dollars a year (based on a $250,000 home valuation) for recruitment and retention of our police officers is money well spent,” Councilor Art Bettge said.
Councilor Anne Zabala was the lone dissenting vote.
She said she wanted to conserve the forgone amount, especially with a possible recession looming. If an economic downturn does occur, she said the state Legislature would possibly reduce the 3-percent annual property tax increase allowed by law or potentially eliminate or alter the ability of local municipalities to save and levy the forgone amount.
“I just think there are a lot of surveys of different folks — economists — that think we’re headed into a recession the next two years and I’m just very hesitant to take money out of that (forgone) pool,” Zabala said.
Instead, she suggested raising police pay 50 percent of what the proposed increases indicated and raising Parks and Recreation Department pool staff 25 percent. Doing so would almost entirely eliminate the need to use the forgone amount, Zabala said.
At the last council meeting, half the councilors favored the raises proposed in the budget, the Lewiston Tribune reported. The other half preferred spreading the increases out over more than one year, in order to reduce the burden on Moscow property taxpayers.